"Countless hours of hard work, hectoliters of coffee, tons of improvements, two version numbers skipped, and here it is: the all-new Opera for desktop is now out as an Opera Next version, Opera's channel for what used to be called beta. Made from scratch, this version is available for Windows and Mac and brings a new, elegant design and a bunch of new features that will make your browsing experience sleeker and easier than ever." The first version using something called 'Chromium's engine' - I guess they can't call it WebKit anymore, but they can't call it Blink yet either. It's looking great, but the bookmark functionality seems to not have been implemented yet in this preview

That doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that the full Opera UI will return.

I sure hope it won't. It was far too complex, causing all kinds of weird regressions. Fixing something in one spot would break something somewhere else because the UI was insanely complex and flexible, and everything tied tightly together.

That shit just doesn't scale. And it was only getting worse.

When people have brought up niche features, such as MDI abilities like tiling tabs, I've seen Opera staff question how important they are and talk about "streamlining" the browser's features to those that people "really use".

So? That doesn't mean they don't understand what people are complaining about. It simply means that they disagree with them. And Opera has actual data on what people are using the browser for, remember.

Would you bet that all the niche features that made Opera unique will ever return in future versions?

They shouldn't. Opera should focus on adding quality features. Quality over quantity.